Safety, Affordability Top Reasons to ‘Get Excited’ About Self-Driving Cars, Says Shapiro

That autonomous vehicles will make lives safer, more “affordable” and more “enjoyable” are three reasons to “get excited” about them, said CTA President Gary Shapiro in a Wednesday opinion piece. If 94 percent of U.S. traffic accidents are caused by human error, as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates, “eliminating human error with self-driving technology will greatly increase the safety of our roads and save tens of thousands of lives and prevent hundreds of thousands of injuries a year,” said Shapiro. Self-driving cars also “will cut the costs of insurance, licensing and repairs, and will free up time spent in traffic or searching for parking spaces,” he wrote for U.S. News & World Report. They’ll also “transform our concept of what a living room can be,” he said. “With these possibilities on the horizon, it's no surprise that three-quarters of consumers are getting increasingly excited about self-driving cars, and two-thirds are willing to trade out their current vehicle for a self-driving one.”